Incised with the artist’s initials and dated ‘YK 62’ (on the right wing); numbered ‘EA I/XXV’ (on the reverse and the underside of the stone) dry blue pigment in synthetic resin on plaster with a metal and stone base 19¾ x 10½ x 10in. (50.2 x 26.7 x 25.4cm.) Executed in 1962, this work is HC number one from an edition of one hundred and seventy-five plus twenty-five HC edited by Galerie Karl Flinker LC, Paris.

I saw this in the Christies window in South Kensington, London this evening. The photo does it no justice at all. Set to auction during their Post-War & Contemporary Art sale on the 14th, Sept., it was a jewel to behold. A heavenly apparition.

When New York artist Andres Serrano plunged a plastic crucifix into a glass of his own urine and photographed it in 1987 under the title Piss Christ, he said he was making a statement on the misuse of religion.

Controversy has followed the work ever since, but reached an unprecedented peak on Palm Sunday when it was attacked with hammers and destroyed after an “anti-blasphemy” campaign by French Catholic fundamentalists in the southern city of Avignon. For four months, it has hung in the exhibition “Je crois aux miracles”, (I Believe in Miracles), to mark 10 years of art-dealer Yvon Lambert’s personal collection in his 18th-century mansion gallery in Avignon. The show is due to end next month, but two weeks ago a concerted protest campaign began.

The Collection Lambert gallery director, Eric Mézil, said the museum would reopen with the destroyed works on show “so people can see what barbarians can do”. He said there had been a kind of “inquisition” against the art work.

right: Piss Christ by Andres Serrano after it was attacked by Christian protesters in Avignon.

METZ, France — From afar, the new Pompidou museum in this postindustrial landscape resembles an enormous snow-white toadstool rising out of a wasteland. The avant-garde shape of the building in this otherwise sleepy provincial city of Lorraine, in once German eastern France, has inspired a flood of nicknames. The mayor calls it the Smurf House…more

The Acropolis Museum in Greece needs to get a little more savvy in it’s approach regarding its desire to have the Parthenon Marbles, aka the Elgin marbles, returned from the British Museum in the UK. The museum could start by hiring Zahi Hawass (mentioned below in a Huffington Post article by Angela Charlton), as consultant.

PARIS — France’s culture minister agreed Friday to return five painted wall fragments to Egypt after a row over their ownership prompted the Egyptians to cut ties with the Louvre Museum.

A committee of 35 specialists unanimously recommended that France give back the painted wall fragments from a 3,200-year-old tomb near the ancient temple city of Luxor.
Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand “immediately decided to follow this recommendation,” his office said in a statement. It was not clear when France would send the fragments back to Egypt.
Mitterrand said the items were acquired by the Louvre in “good faith” and that the decision to return them reflects France’s and the Louvre’s commitment of “resolute action against illegal trafficking of cultural goods.”

Egypt’s antiquities chief Zahi Hawass described the disputed fragments as pieces of a burial fresco showing the nobleman Tetaki’s journey to the afterlife.
Hawass took his campaign to recover the nation’s lost treasures to a new level Wednesday by cutting ties with the Louvre over the artifacts. It was the most aggressive effort yet by Hawass, Egypt’s tough and media-savvy chief archaeologist, to reclaim what he says are antiquities stolen from the country and purchased by leading world museums.